# Color Palettes in Procreate: Find Your Unique Illustration Color Style - review & insight | Gareth B. Davies Source: https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/color-palettes-in-procreate-find-your-unique-illustration-color-style/ [← All courses](https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/) Illustration & Drawing · Quick win · Rated 7 /10 # Color Palettes in Procreate: Find Your Unique Illustration Color Style Updated August 2026 Iva Mikles · Illustrator | Top Teacher | Art Side of Life Beginner · 71 min A concise, personality-driven walkthrough of one illustrator's color process, useful mainly if you already draw but freeze up on color choices. [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fcolor-palettes-in-procreate-find-your-unique-illustration-color-style%2F120941949) New to Skillshare? Your first month is free, enough to take this course at no cost. Iva Mikles built this class around a simple premise: picking colors doesn't have to be a guessing game, and the fastest way out of that guessing game is reference and repetition. Over roughly 70 minutes and thirteen lessons, she walks through where to find color inspiration, how to interpret it, and how to translate it into a working palette using two practice illustrations, a girl surrounded by flowers and a small village scene. ## Structure and what it actually covers The class opens with a short but genuinely useful primer on color language, connecting hues like yellow, purple, and gray to the moods they tend to evoke, then grounds that theory in a practical question: what is the art supposed to communicate, and to whom. From there it moves into sourcing, covering Pinterest boards, Society6 trend pages, interior design sites, and physical references like magazines, packaging, and animation art books from studios like Pixar and Disney. This section is heavier on browsing habits than technique, but it does model a real workflow rather than just gesturing at "get inspired." The back half is where the class earns its keep. Four back-to-back exercises walk through building palettes from color harmonies, warm earthy tones sampled from travel photos, bold complementary combinations like yellow and purple, and techniques for making saturated colors pop by pairing them with muted neutrals and non-black shadow tones. Each exercise follows the same loop: import a photo reference, sample colors with Procreate's color picker, then test the resulting palette across several quick, unrendered thumbnails before settling on a final combination. The closing exercise, on finding a personal color signature, is the most conceptually interesting part of the class: starting from a single color a person is currently drawn to, then generating multiple unrelated pieces, a deer, a parrot, a human figure, a moth, all from that one restrained palette to see how far it stretches. ## Strengths and limits The coloring tips lesson adds real technical value beyond the color-theory framing, covering drag-and-drop fills into closed shapes, selection-based coloring for clean edges, texture brushes, and Procreate's recolor adjustment tool with its flood setting for isolating hues on a shared layer. These are concrete, transferable Procreate skills, not just color talk. Where the class falls short is depth on the harmony exercises themselves, which move quickly through analogous, complementary, and triadic schemes without dwelling long enough on any single one to build real fluency. It also leans heavily on one illustrator's personal taste, muted earth tones, soft pastels, so viewers hoping for guidance on high-contrast or unconventional palettes outside that aesthetic will need to extrapolate. The pacing suits someone who already has a body of unfinished sketches sitting around waiting for color, less so someone starting from zero. As a beginner-labeled class, it assumes more baseline comfort with both drawing and Procreate than the label suggests, and works best as a confidence and process reset for illustrators who already have the fundamentals but keep defaulting to the same predictable palette. The standout Building one flexible color palette around a single anchor hue, then testing it across several unrelated thumbnail subjects to find a recognizable signature style. ## What you will learn - · How to read the emotional associations of individual colors (yellow, pink, purple, black, red, blue, green, gray) and apply them to a creative brief - · How to build a mood board from Pinterest, books, packaging, and real-life photos rather than copying premade palettes - · How to sample colors from a photo reference with Procreate's color picker and adapt them into a working palette - · How to test a palette quickly using small thumbnails before committing to a full rendered illustration - · How to build palettes around specific color harmonies: analogous, complementary, and triadic - · How to push a palette toward warmth, boldness, or brightness by adjusting saturation and using unexpected hues in shadows Best for: Illustrators who already have basic drawing and Procreate skills but consistently freeze up or default to the same few colors when it's time to color a piece. Skip it if: Complete beginners looking to learn Procreate's interface or color theory fundamentals from scratch, since the class assumes comfort with both. Helpful Examples Engaging Teacher Organization of Lessons Clarity of Instruction [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fcolor-palettes-in-procreate-find-your-unique-illustration-color-style%2F120941949)